Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [42]
Under a hot, cloudless sky lay a wide field of high grass, simply covered with the English dead and wounded, and wounded and dead cattle. The British boys had been massacred by the tanks, as they had no artillery, only a few light machine guns to supplement their rifles–about as effective against a tank’s armor as a peashooter … Here, as last night, we didn’t find a single dead or wounded German. Out of possibly 300 British, we picked up maybe 25 or 30. The rest had all been killed.
When Coster asked one wounded Englishman what he thought of the Panzer columns, he said, ‘Beautiful to watch, but terrible to receive.’
A German soldier mistook Coster, whose ambulance uniform was similar to a British soldier’s, for an Englishman and stole his leather gloves. Coster grabbed the gloves back. ‘In the fraction of a second, his revolver was pointed at my stomach. I pointed to the American Field Service band on my arm and explained, “Amerikanisch”.’ The officer saluted him and walked off. Other German officers complained of the Americans, ‘Ah–we never see any of you–on our side.’
On 14 June, the day the Germans occupied Paris, the four American ‘doctors’ were still working at the Amiens ‘German-American’ hospital. A Belgian Red Cross delegate and his wife, M. and Mme Alfred Chambon, arrived to visit the wounded. Coster asked if they would take him and his three comrades to Brussels. ‘We hurried to the Kommandant. At first his answer was definitely no; but we argued so loudly (and lied so convincingly about the pressure that would be applied by the American Consulate in Brussels when they heard of our plight) that at last he relented.’ The Chambons drove the four Americans in their small Ford to Brussels, where the American Ambassador placed them ‘under the protection of the Embassy’. Wait, King and Clement stayed in Belgium awaiting repatriation to the United States. On 1 July, American diplomat George Kennan, who was visiting from the US Embassy in Berlin, took Coster in his car back to Paris. ‘We were stopped three times,’ Coster wrote of the drive, ‘but Mr. Kennan’s pass and his perfect German took us safely through.’ Kennan wrote that he had given a lift to ‘one of the American ambulance drivers, who was trying to get down to Paris to recover his clothes’. The French peasants along the roads evoked strong sympathy from the two Americans. ‘Refugees were laboriously making their way back northwards, in search of their homes,’ Kennan recorded in his diary. ‘Most were traveling on the great two-wheeled horse-drawn cart of the French peasant, which could accommodate a whole family and many of its belongings.’ Kennan noticed a young girl on one of the carts:
Her dress was torn and soiled. She had probably not taken her clothes off, or been able to wash, for days … All the youth had gone out of her face. There was only a bitterness too deep for complaint, a wondering too intense for questions. What would be her reaction to life after this? Just try to tell her of liberalism and democracy, of progress, of ideals, of tradition, of romantic love; see how far you get … She saw the complete moral breakdown and degradation of her own people. She saw them fight with each other and stumble over each other in their blind stampede to get away and to save their possessions before the advancing Germans. She saw her own soldiers, routed, demoralized, trying to push their way back through the streams of refugees on the highways. She saw her own people pillaging and looting in a veritable orgy of dissolution as they fled before the advancing